Dr. Mahchid Namazi earned her Master of Science degree in Speech-Language Pathology from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada (1996)and her PhD in Communication Sciences & Disorders, with a specialization in bilingualism, from McGill University in Montreal, Canada (2010). During her early career, Dr. Namazi served as a staff speech-language pathologist at the GF Strong Rehabilitation Centre in Vancouver, Canada where she worked with adults with a variety of acquired communication disorders. While at GF Strong Rehabilitation Centre, she coordinated a Canadian Institute for Health Research initiative to develop an outcomes measurement tool for adults receiving rehabilitation services in the province of British Columbia. In 1999, Dr. Namazi moved to the BC Centre for Ability, the largest interdisciplinary pediatric rehabilitation centre in British Columbia serving children birth to 5, with multiple disabilities. During the last two years of her stay at the BC Centre for Ability, Dr. Namazi served as the Director of the Speech-Language Pathology department and saw her team through accreditation.
In 2003, Dr. Namazi moved to Montreal to complete her doctoral degree at McGill University. While completing her PhD, she established a vibrant multilingual pediatric practice specializing in the assessment and treatment of children who were exposed to two or more languages. She also developed and conducted workshops on assessment and treatment issues in multilingual children for early childhood educators. Dr. Namazi provided consultative services to preschools throughout the Montreal area to assist early childhood educators in working with and teaching multilingual children with language disorders.
Dr. Namazi’s research has been published in peer-reviewed journals and she has presented her work at national and international conferences. She has been a strong advocate for children with language disorders whose first language is not the one of the majority community. Dr. Namazi is incredibly passionate about spreading the word, through her research, that bilingualism does not cause or exacerbate language delays and disorders and that parents should not be counseled to not speak their home language.
“Language is essential for all learning. It is generally found that the better the child’s language skills are in her own language, the more capable she will be of learning and using a foreign language (Dunn 1998, p. 37)”